A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

Jeroen Ruigrok tried using ‘CPUTYPE=p4′ in make.conf as an option to gcc. The resulting kernel crashed; and several people pointed out that the CPUTYPE optimization does not work – especially with gcc 2.x. Matt Dillon went on further to explain how little it helps:

“Trying to use cpu-specific optimizations in 2.95.x is roughly equivalent to a blind man driving an 18 wheeler down the highway. In other words: “don’t do it, it doesn’t work”. GCC2 is known to produce bad code not only with CPUTYPE, but also with higher optimization levels like -O2. Blame the GCC folks for this.

GCC3 does a better job but even so I would not use CPUTYPE without being prepared to turn it off when something breaks, and at best I might use -O2 or -Os (under GCC3 only, and even then we don’t really officially support it, since differentiating between compiler code generation bugs and DFly bugs is extremely difficult).